Law, Language and the Courtroom: Legal Linguistics and the Discourse of Judges

This book explores the language of judges. It is concerned with understanding how language works in judicial contexts. Using a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, it looks in detail at the ways in which judicial discourse is argued, constructed, interpreted and perceived. Focusing on four central themes - constructing judicial discourse and judicial identities, judicial argumentation and evaluative language, judicial interpretation, and clarity in judicial discourse - the book's ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of current critical issues of the role of language in judicial settings. Contributors include legal linguists, lawyers, legal scholars, legal practitioners, legal translators and anthropologists, who explore patterns of linguistic organisation and use in judicial institutions and analyse language as an instrument for understanding both the judicial decision-making process and its outcome.

The book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in legal linguistics and those specialising in judicial argumentation and reasoning, and forensic linguists interested in the use of language in judicial settings.

Gianluca Pontrandolfo holds a PhD in Translation and Interpreting Studies. He is currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of Trieste (Italy) in the Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies (IUSLIT) where he lectures on specialised translation from Spanish into Italian. His research interests include corpus linguistics, legal phraseology, legal translation training, LSP discourse, genre analysis, corpus-assisted critical discourse studies. He has published widely in the area of legal and judicial discourse, from a contrastive corpus-based perspective.

Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Specialised Languages and Intercultural Communication, University of Lodz (Poland), where he has been teaching various seminars in specialised communication and legal discourse analysis. His research focuses on functional and corpus-based approaches to the study of judicial discourse in US and Polish courts. He has published widely in the area of variation in legal language, legal phraseology and communicating evaluative meanings in judicial opinions. He is now involved in researching legal argumentation in the justification of judicial decisions.